Song man of the century

Posted: Sunday, December 23, 2001

Into a world with "God Bless America" on its lips, just in time for the season when "White Christmas" pays its extended visit to the airwaves, comes a big, fat book of all the lyrics of Irving Berlin, the amazing songwriter who wrote not only our unofficial national anthem and perennial holiday paean, but more than 1,200 other songs.

It's possible that even more lyrics may surface, says Robert Kimball, the jovial musical theater historian who, for the past nine years, has been collecting the prodigious Berlin's work - "Marie From Sunny Italy," a ditty from 1907 (for which Berlin earned 37 cents in royalties), through "Growing Gray," an unpublished verse written in 1987, when at age 99, he observed, "The best is yet to be."

This from a man who wrote "Always" 62 years before.

"Mr. Berlin" is how Kimball consistently refers to the songwriter, seeming a tad sheepish about such formality in the super-casual 21st century. Over tea, he explains: "It's just what I've always called him." In the pair's "long telephone friendship," they covered myriad topics (they met but once, in the early '60s, "for about 10 seconds" at a performance of Berlin's "Mr. President"). Kimball has come to know the songwriter's children; Linda Berlin Emmet, the second of three daughters, worked with him in editing "The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin" (Alfred Knopf).

Review

Title: The Complete Lyrics of Irving Berlin

Author: Edited by Robert Kimball and Linda Emmet

Publisher: Knopf

Price: $60

Previously the editor of the lyrics collections of Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin and Lorenz Hart - and at work on Frank Loesser's (with Johnny Mercer on the probable horizon) - the musicologist's respect reflects both his feelings about the songwriter as well as his own tastes. Here is someone, a native New Yorker, programmed since childhood: Kimball's first vocal assignment, at a precocious 4, was Berlin's tune "It's a Lovely Day Tomorrow." His 1946 "Annie Get Your Gun" was the first musical "I can remember," to which his mother, an amateur musician, took him.

The music between the wars (that would be the World Wars), during which Berlin's career thrived, is Kimball's personal favorite. Another upcoming project will be a history of musical theater of the '20s and '30s.

It's been suggested that instead of collecting a songwriter's entire output, Kimball select "the best 50 or the best 100," but he'll have none of that - although he does distinguish "As Thousands Cheer," Berlin's 1933 revue that includes "Supper Time," "Heat Wave" and "Easter Parade," as his best show.

"Who knows why the great philosophers of ancient Greece passed from the scene?" Kimball replies when questioned about the present's dramatic shortage of great songwriters. Berlin, for example, stopped publishing songs long before his death in 1989. "Old-Fashioned Wedding," written for the 1966 revival of "Annie Get Your Gun," was his last published work.

"It's time to close up shop,"' Kimball quotes Berlin on his decision to withdraw from the public eye after musical tastes began to change drastically in the late '50s.

The era and the men who created the great American songbook ended, Kimball believes, "because those songs about dreams coming true no longer worked or made sense. The unrest in the country showed society was in trouble. There was no longer a vision of possibilities and opportunities. The feelings [those songwriters had] about their world were not the same for the new generation, whose songs are more about fragmentation and alienation."

When Berlin, a Russian immigrant, came on the scene at the early part of the 20th century, however, it was he who was instrumental in changing American music - which, he once observed, was basically an imitation of European music. He was careful, however, not to hog the credit: Among notes included in "The Complete Lyrics" is Berlin's observation that "there were many ragtime songs before..." the 1911 song that made him famous: "Alexander's Ragtime Band."

"It's hard to say why anyone is great," Kimball muses before agreeing to take a stab at Berlin's immortal qualities: "He had great simplicity and great directness. He found themes that resonated with a lot of different people, phrases that reached people." Not incidentally, "he just got better and better."

Any songwriter whose work endures "continues to offer us inspiration and pleasure, is thought-provoking, recaptures the wonder of the moment," Kimball believes.

To illustrate, he picks one of Berlin's songs in which "there's recently been a lot of renewed interest - not 'God Bless America,' but 'Let's Face the Music and Dance' [introduced by Fred Astaire in 1936's "Follow the Fleet"]. It isn't just about music and dancing but about life," says Kimball, quoting the song's first line: "There may be trouble ahead"' and a later one: "There may be teardrops to shed.'

"Yes" - a little smile crosses Kimball's face when he quotes lyrics he likes - "we cry, but isn't that so much a better way to say it?"